Going through court records is no picnic. Researchers all over the world know the psychological dangers of this: the brutal loneliness under the murky neon lights, the ghosts of old injustices that come back to haunt you, and the nagging hope of finally finding the Grail in the next box of archives. .
Fortunately, Richard Conyngham, a South African historian based in Mexico City, does not lack stamina, either mentally or physically. Conyngham emerged unscathed from his dive into the basement archives of the Supreme Court of Appeal, Bloemfontein [dans le centre de l’Afrique du Sud] – with many legal cases in its bag that have given rise to social progress.
The result gave All Rise. Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa 1910-1948 [“Ils se levèrent tous. Résistance et rébellion en Afrique du Sud”, sorti en janvier 2022 en Afrique du Sud, non traduit en français]a never-before-seen documentary comic about the actions of workers, shopkeepers, laundresses and farmers against the pre-apartheid state [institué en 1948, ce régime de ségrégation raciale est resté en vigueur jusqu’en 1991].
Attract young readers
To bring these stories of social protest to life, Conyngham called on a team of exceptional artists: the Trantraal brothers, Saaid Rahbeeni, Liz Clarke, Dada Khanyisa, Tumi Mamabolo and Mark Modimola.
“It was a huge challenge to recruit these artists and work with them. I was very demanding, and I wanted to find artists who were somehow connected to the story, but not necessarily directly.”
The idea was to harness the visual power of comics to appeal to young readers and bring a neglected period of South African history to life. “Court records have revealed the incredibly colorful and explosive nature of this period,” Conyngham reports. Whereas school and university history curricula don’t give that impression at all.”
As Edwin Cameron notes [membre retraité de la Cour constitutionnelle d’Afrique du Sud et autorité morale dans le pays] in the preface toAll Rise, some of these stories remind us that “the law, when applied correctly, can produce results that are just, even in cases of great injustice”.
“There was always room for manoeuvre”
That said, Conyngham says he didn’t see much compassion in the files. “It was respect for the law that took precedence for the judges, and not empathy for people, he notes. Judges were often very racist or sexist, even when they agreed with plaintiffs against the state. There was [cependant] there was always room for manoeuvre, and some judges were so adamant about respecting the law that they sometimes made surprising decisions. I think Edwin Cameron had this kind of situation when he was a barrister under apartheid, the judge’s respect for the law could be put to good use if you were really good in court.”
In her foreword, Hlonipha Mokoena, historian at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research [à Johannesburg], notes that the common thread running through all of these stories is that of migration – almost all of the plaintiffs or defenders, whether black, white or Indian, are immigrants, fighting for the rights accorded to (some) citizens. This struggle is still relevant, and all these stories, she writes, “reaffirm the reasons why our Constitution is not only a legal refinement but above all a moral imperative”.
Some of the historians Conyngham consulted were not enthusiastic about the format, he laments. “Comics are still quite frowned upon in academic circles, in part because some feel endangered by this form of expression. During my research, I contacted many specialists in the subjects I was working on. Some were very receptive, others not at all, as if they did not take – or did not want to take – this format seriously.
Thousands of pages of documents and exhibits
All Rise grew out of a project started by HIV and AIDS activist Zackie Achmat, who hired Conyngham as a researcher in 2015. “It was Zackie who came up with the idea of poking around in the records of the Supreme Court of Appeals,” says Conyngham. Through his legal actions, he had uncovered some obscure judgments from the early 20th century, such as Rex v Detody [1926, voir plus loin].”
“So we went to Bloemfontein and did a lot of photocopying. We left with files of 12 to 15 cases, some of which had thousands of pages.”
Conyngham came up with the idea of making it a graphic documentary, not the conventional history book originally planned. With the support of Achmat, he first approached his friend André Trantraal, a star of South African comics, with whom he had already collaborated to illustrate an explanatory guide to the issues of the O’Regan commission. -Pikoli [2012] on the action of the police in the township of Khayelitsha.
Conyngham wrote the screenplays himself, following the artists’ expert advice when it came to cutting out superfluous details. Documentary comics are perfectly capable of conveying all the complexity of historical facts, sometimes more effectively than a film, because of the radical freedom of drawing. Thus, the books by Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel have conveyed the truth of historical fact better than any prose book could have done.
But this format also demands a certain narrative conciseness to gain readability – which Conyngham achieved by shifting the historical context into beautifully crafted appendices at the end of each story, complete with photos of locations, protagonists and their handwritten letters. The National Archives even contained a lock of hair from 1922 Rand Rebellion striker Taffy Long [Samuel Alfred de son vrai nom, un immigré gallois qui a participé à ce soulèvement de mineurs afrikaners de la région du Rand], sentenced for executing a police informant. The samples were an exhibit for the prosecution, who argued that he deliberately altered the color of his hair using potassium permanganate. Long’s trial, later carried out at Pretoria Central Jail, is staged in a dark and very cinematic way by Clarke in the chapter “Come Gallows Grim” [“À nous la potence”].
A luminous line
Dans “In the Shadow of a High Stone Wall” [“ À l’ombre d’un mur”]the Trantraal brothers, Nathan and André, tackle the story of Jack Whittaker, a Johannesburg streetcar worker who laid down his tools during a strike in 1911. Over the course of the story, we meet by Mary Fitzgerald, an important figure in Johannesburg’s early social movements [née en Irlande, elle passe pour la première femme syndicaliste de l’histoire sud-africaine]. Whittaker is charged with possession of explosives. His acquittal is a victory, it is above all his subsequent claim for damages from the State for inhumane detention pending trial that will mark a milestone.
Khanyisa’s bright stroke illustrates “The Widow of Marabastad” [“ La Veuve de Marabastad” voir ci-dessus], an account of a long battle against the passes imposed on black women for their night movements in the Transvaal. This fight was led by a Pretoria washerwoman, Helena Detody, in 1926. With the support of the Transvaal Indian Congress [un parti politique aujourd’hui disparu], she takes her fight for the right to move freely to the Supreme Court of Bloemfontein. Detody’s triumph guarantees the free movement of black women in the Transvaal for twenty years.
Mamabolo a dessiné “A House Divided” [“Une maison divisée”] on the confrontation in 1922 between August Mokgatle, the leader of the Bafokeng [une ethnie du nord-ouest du pays], and its lekgotla, or tribal council. Mokgatle’s councillors, partly inspired by the democratic ideas of a black Jamaican reverend who had settled in Phokeng, Kenneth Spooner, had rejected his authority. Despite the passionate testimony of [l’écrivain et militant] Solomon Plaatje in the courtroom defending the rebels and their ideals, the Department of Native Affairs wins the case and banishes them – paving the way for puppet Bantustan governments and the demise of pre-colonial forms of tribal democracy.
Dans “Until the Ship Sails” [“ Tant que l’ancre n’est pas levée”]Rahbeeni illustrates the story of Mahomed Chotabhai, a 15-year-old Indian boy who is banned from staying in South Africa with his father, a shopkeeper from Johannesburg, following discriminatory measures taken by the government of Jan Smuts [au pouvoir de 1919 à 1924 et de 1939 à 1948] against Indian workers. At the time, a registration certificate was put in place for Indian workers in the Transvaal – in an attempt to monitor newcomers – and sparked a campaign of mobilization – the Indians burned their certificates – and the case Chotabhai was taken over by Gandhi.